The integration of AI into businesses is becoming increasingly crucial for success in today’s rapidly evolving landscape. Organizations must actively assess how AI can best serve their unique needs and objectives.

In a wide-ranging recent conversation, Algolia’s CTO, Sean Mullaney, was joined by guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester, to chat about how AI really works and organizations can embrace new opportunities presented by AI while also overcoming challenges in the process. You can watch a recording of the full discussion here. 

The conversation covered topics including:

• Transforming the ecommerce experience with AI
• A strategic approach to implementing AI systems
• Best practices for testing and experimenting
• The build vs. buy phenomenon
• Challenges for generative AI
• Enhancing the search experience with vector technology
• Conversational digital shopping experiences
• Mitigating potential pitfalls when adopting AI

Here’s a brief overview of some of the major themes that came up during their insightful session:

The AI explosion

The technology behind AI has been around for several years, but it was really only big tech companies that had the capital and expertise to run it. That’s changed. The availability of the technology — AI models and GPU computing — have made it much more accessible. While ChatGPT is the most visible solution today, there are many others. 

A multi-model future

A general misnomer about AI solutions is that they’re one enormous model. OpenAI’s solutions are quite good, but that’s far from the only approach. There will be thousands of other AI models. There will be large ones for very general use, but smaller, more precise models for different solutions. You can imagine a large language model trained on the law, medicine, literature, or even a company’s specific corpus of data, such as that in an e-commerce catalog.

The Ecommerce use case

Ecommerce companies have made huge catalogs of items available to users all over the world. Yet, sites can still feel overwhelming. Finding the perfect product for each shopper at the perfect moment can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s the paradox of choice. However, with AI, the search journey can be personalized so it will be much more human-like and easier to find the best results. 

Being successful with AI adoption

Every organization will need to determine how AI can most benefit their business. To be successful, organizations will need to adopt a culture of experimentation. Jeff Bezos has suggested the key to Amazon’s success has been that they have a speed and volume of experimentation that is faster than everyone else in the market. For companies to succeed, they will need to measure the speed and volume at which you’re experimenting with AI to understand if you’re doing well. 

This was only a brief summary of some key points and lots of actionable advice that Sean and Mike touched on that can benefit organizational leaders like CTOs and CIOs across businesses of all sizes.

Listen now to the entire presentation.